An Anti-Imperialist's Reading List: Part Two

by Joseph Stromberg

This timeless article first appeared on February 20, 2001.

COLD
WAR IMPERIALISM, OR ‘LEADERSHIP OF THE FREE WORLD’

With
the ritual bombing of Iraq taking on symbolic importance as the
first foreign policy act of any incoming US administration, it is
astounding that our wonderful "free press" can never bothered
to admit, much less discuss, the joys and sorrows of empire. World
War II left the United States unscathed – other than by big
government – with the lowest proportional casualty figures
of any major participant. Ours was the only fully-functioning economy
in the world. Our cities were unbombed. It would have been possible
to demobilize after victory, but that is the last thing anyone
should expect a rising world power to do. Soviet creation of a tier
of friendly states on its western frontier seemed to bespeak one
of those long-standing "plans to conquer the world," of
which we sometimes hear, but in fact stemmed logically from the
results of the late war.

The
US leadership chose to read Soviet policy as a cosmic
challenge of life-and-death proportions, rather than
negotiate solutions along the lines of the neutralization
of Austria in 1953. D.F. Fleming’s The
Cold War and Its Origins, 2 vol. (Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961) is very detailed and, therefore,
useful on the critical period, 1945-1947, before Stalin
made his final decision to impose one-party Communist
regimes throughout Eastern Europe. What hung in the
balance was whether Eastern Europe would be "Finlandized"
or Stalinized. On the face of it, the former seems
preferable, but US pressure arguably forced Stalin’s
hand. This has nothing to do with believing that Stalin
was anything but a totalitarian monster, but much
to do with whether or not one believes it was useful
for American leaders to overplay their hand when they
had no intention of going to war over their demands.
Cynical US encouragement of Hungarian rebels in 1956
– rebels whom US authorities had no intention of actually
helping – seems a case in point. Fleming’s account
suffers from his neo-Wilsonian preconceptions and
his view that Stalin was significantly better than
the defeated Hitler. I repeat: the critique of the
Cold War does not depend on certifying Stalin as a
nice man and, anyway, Stalin did not live forever.
The critique of the Cold War rests on whether or not
it was in fact essential for the safety and freedom
of the American people, the only constituents in whose
name US officials ought ever to have acted. Those
like Hubert Humphrey, who wrote that "the cause
is mankind," ought perhaps to have removed themselves
to Geneva.

Charles
Mee, Meeting
at Potsdam (New York: M. Evans, 1975) deals
with the postwar division of Germany, treating such
matters as reparations, Allied administration of Germany
by zones, and US use of the atomic bombs on Japanese
civilians. He ties these into an account consistent
with the independent existence of non-negotiable US
goals which were bound to stir up trouble with Russia,
no matter who was running that country. John Lukacs’
A
New History of the Cold War (Garden City,
NY: Anchor Books, 1966) is essential reading. Lukacs,
a Hungarian historian who became an American citizen,
airs surprisingly critical views of the Cold War from
a unique conservative perspective. His discussion
of the Cuban Missile Crisis, for example, is at some
variance with the received version.

NOT
EVERYONE WAS AMUSED

Charles
Mee notes that Truman’s policy was inherently interventionist.
The voters returned a Republican House of Representatives
in 1946, showing that Americans were ready for release
from wartime controls and global crusading. Faced
with domestic resistance to his plans, Truman ratcheted
up the rhetoric of the Soviet/Communist threat, thereby
distorting internal US politics for two generations
while providing a handy ideological cover for what
remained, to all intents and purposes, continued pursuit
of Open Door Empire.

Not
everyone went along. The transformation of the Right
from "isolationism" to unrestrained intervention
took a few years. In the meantime, Senator Robert
Taft’s A Foreign Policy for Americans (New
York: Doubleday, 1951) called for a very restrained
foreign policy, one which fell far short of what Republican
internationalists wanted. The "northern agrarian"
Louis Bromfield made a very bitter attack on the Cold
War in A
New Pattern for a Tired World (London: Cassell
& Company, 1954), did Garet Garrett in The
People’s Pottage (Boston: Western Islands,
1965), the Old Right journalist’s classic essays from
the early 1950s. Historian Justus D. Doenecke’s Not
to the Swift: The Old Isolationists in the Cold War
Era (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press,
1979) treats the Old Right’s rearguard action against
Cold War interventionism in detail.

ATOMIC
DIPLOMACY AND THE LOGIC OF EXTERMINISM

Our
old friend, the Bomb, was a brooding presence throughout
the High Cold War, along with the various insane rationales
for using it. Annihilationist "strategy"
became a growth industry in military-industrial-university
thinktanks. Martin J. Sherwin, A
World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance(New York: Vintage Books, 1977) is very useful
on the genesis and use of the bomb. Strong criticisms
of the whole syndrome can be found in E.P. Thompson,
The Heavy Dancers: Writings on War, Past and Future
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) and George
F. Kennan, The
Nuclear Delusion: Soviet-American Relations in the
Atomic Age(New York: Pantheon, 1983).

A
FINAL WORD

The
free press, indeed. Friday, I think it was, I was
watching one of our heroic networks on the latest
bombing. The announcer said something like, "Iraqi
officials SAID [obligatory sneer] that several civilians
were injured." The accompanying film clip showed
someone who did, indeed, appear to be a child, carried
on what appeared to be a stretcher, towards what appeared
to be an ambulance. My question: Why show the damned
film at all, then? Perhaps Saddam Hussein has a special
cadre of actors, who portray imaginary victims of
US bombing as needed. Alternatively, if US networks
must show the film, can they perhaps refrain from
lecturing us on the nature of what we are seeing?
On the face of it, it seems to speak for itself. We
are looking at the joys and sorrows of unacknowledged
Empire.

Well,
the honeymoon could not last. I only hope that W does
not give us reason to wish Al Gore was in office.
I doubt that is possible, but then history is not
a predictive science.

Joseph R. Stromberg has been writing for libertarian
publications since 1973, including The Individualist, Reason,
the Journal of
Libertarian Studies, Libertarian Review, and the Agorist
Quarterly, and is completing a set of essays on America's wars.
He was recently named the JoAnn B. Rothbard Historian in Residence at
the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
His column, "The Old Cause," appears alternating Fridays on
Antiwar.com.

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